


Relics

by aces



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:33:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Doctor:  Let the TARDIS die. Just let this old box gather dust. No-one can open it, no-one will even notice it. Let it become a strange little thing standing on a street corner. And over the years, the world will move on and the box will be buried.<br/>~ "Parting of the Ways"</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Relics

**Author's Note:**

> Idea sparked by rewatching Parting of the Ways and by reading _Small Things Forgotten_ for my material culture class at the time, and it's all about historical archaeology.

On a sunny, humid July day in the year 2478, they uncovered a blue box. They had to call Dr Juniper over, since she was the one who could read that form of English.

"Police public call box," she carefully read aloud; only the top foot and a half or so were uncovered so far. "Huh. I wonder if that means the police used it or if regular citizens used it to call the police for help?" They looked at each other and shrugged, and she shook her head. "Never mind, just keep at it." She smiled at them all, patted the nearest young undergrad on the shoulder. He grinned back. "Good work."

Inch by inch they uncovered the rest of the box; it was much larger than Dr Juniper had expected, but that was all part of the fun. She'd dug up some information about police boxes; popular in the middle of the twentieth century and dying out not long after that, this box seemed an anachronism judging by the tentative dates they'd gotten from other artefacts in the same location.

"You are out of place just a bit, aren't you?" she said to the box, running a gloved hand delicately over its still bright blue side. "Well. Out of time, anyway." She walked all around it, noting down its measurements, materials, placement in this section of the dig. She drew numerous sketches and took lots of pictures, all in preparation for when they moved it off-site to protect it from the elements. Nobody else quite got why _this_ particular object interested her so much (Dr Kugarin was absolutely fascinated by the tarmac they'd uncovered, though, so there was no accounting for taste).

It was remarkably well-preserved, this large blue box; the windows were a bit cobwebbed and the wood—_was_ it wood, though?—a bit scratched, but it was all still in one piece, which was more than could be said for Kugarin's tarmac. No matter how much research Juniper did, she couldn't figure out what this box was doing here—there'd been a brief reoccurrence in popularity of the boxes in the early twenty-first century, but never any record of one on this street corner, and certainly not in the later twenty-second century, when most of the other artefacts seemed to be from in this particular layer of soil.

But that simply meant they could be missing records, missing other information. After all, the object was _here_.

"You strange old anomaly," Dr Juniper said almost fondly to the police box as she entered the storage room. She'd grown rather attached to it over the weeks; it took up rather a lot of space, and they'd long ago catalogued it, but there was something about it that pulled her. It would go to long-term storage soon, but first she wanted to try to open it and discover if anything was inside.

The tests they'd run on the box had proven inconclusive—no way to tell how old it really was, what it was truly made of, and she had no way to interpret it. Maybe, just maybe, opening it up would give her some ideas.

She used a laser to break the lock. Heart beating a little faster, putting on gloves, she pulled at the handle on the right-side door and opened.

Empty.

Just a little box on the inside, with a load of dust and some more cobwebs. Dr Juniper looked around inside in disappointment, then closed the doors again, turning away.

Ah well. It had been worth a shot. Now the box, catalogued, accessioned, put neatly into an inventory, would be put away with the rest of the finds from the dig, and perhaps someday it would be placed on display in an exhibit somewhere.

It would probably never give away any of its secrets.  
_Rose: Mum was right. Maybe we should just lock the door and walk away._


End file.
